Why Is The Catholic Church Fighting Gay Marriage?

I'm sure you've read--or heard-- Queen Gertrude's observation in Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." 

It's often misquited:  People often move "methinks" from the end to the beginning of that line.  But more important, most people misuse the quote. "Protest", in Shakespeare's time, meant "avow" or "affirm" rather than "object" or "deny".  

Whether it's used as intended or misused, the quote is apt for at least one current situation. Once again, the Catholic Church is spending lots of money and other resources to oppose same-sex marriage.   In fact, earlier this month, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago launched a last-ditch effort to convince the lame-duck Illinois legislature not to legalize unions between people of the same gender. Whether or not his efforts were a factor, the vote in the Land of Lincoln has been delayed and the bill will be re-introduced after the new legislature is seated.

Why do you think the Church is so adamant in its opposition to gay marriage? Well, some will say that it's a matter of Church doctrine.  As it's hardly an area of my expertise--and because I'm sure that my reading of the Bible is very different from that of any member of the College of Cardinals--I'm not going to discuss that.  Those anti-gay priests may well be motivated by what they believe to be divinely-inspired tenets of the faith.

Being a, shall we say, very lapsed Catholic, my view is a bit different.  You might say it's more cynical.  Here goes:  Much of the Church's opposition to same-sex unions is, I believe, a smokescreen.  They have far, far more serious problems to consider right now, including the elephant in the Vatican chambers:  pedophile priests.  

The damage they've done is incalculable.  You begin to realize that when you hear people talking--for the first time--about they experienced two and three decades earlier. When you're a small child, you simply don't have the language or frame of reference to tell anybody about such an ordeal.  I know this from my own life:  I was well into my thirties before I talked about the sexual molestation I experienced as a child.  

For most children--especially altar boys--being sexually abused by a priest  has to be even more devastating than molestation by anyone else because many kids are taught to trust men of the collar even more than they trust any other adult, save perhaps for their own parents.  Even if nobody tells them they should hold priests in such esteem, a lot of kids learn to do so through implication and osmosis.  That is to be expected when you realize that young children are capable of believing and trusting more completely in God or anyone who is supposed to represent Him.

I don't know how many children have been so damaged by priests, but I'm sure that for every one we hear about, there are many, many more.  I don't think the Church will ever die out completely, but I wouldn't be surprised to see dioceses in the United States (and, possibly other countries) go bankrupt and parishes close because of lawsuits on behalf of the victims.  Plus, the church is in trouble in other ways:  It's in decline in much of Europe because the populations of such predominantly-Catholic countries as Spain, France and Italy aren't growing--or, if there is growth, it's in non-Catholic populations.  Plus, people in those countries and the US aren't attending church, or sending their kids to Catholic schools, nearly as much as they have even in the recent past.

And the Church is spending its spending its money to fight gay marriage?

You know what they say about gay marriage:  If you don't believe in it, don't marry a gay person.  Likewise, all the Church has to do is what it's done for 2000 years. More precisely, it doesn't have to start doing what it hasn't done in that time:  perform gay marriages.  Let Illinois and Rhode Island and other states join New York, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont and the other states that have legalized gay marriage.  As those states are still part of the United States, they still have (at least in law) a separation between Church and State.  So, no matter what laws are passed in those or any other states, no Catholic priest is going to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies--not in the confines of a consecrated church building, anyway.

The End Of Memory: Beyond Forgetting

Yesterday I rode my bike through a part of Brooklyn in which I spent much of my childhood.  I hadn't been there in four years.  The last time I was there, it was an unusually hot for this time of year, but would have been absolutely normal, say, in late July or early August.  The same could have been said for yesterday.


And, yesterday shared another trait with that day four years ago:  There were no shadows, as if the heat had evaporated them--or, perhaps, prevented them from being born in the first place.


Actually, what I just described is also how I remember every summer day--and many in other seasons--in that neighborhood.  Everything seemed burnished into a tablet of a moment would last for days, weeks, months, years, and even entire lifetimes.  It's what I sometimes call the Eternal Present.  


Yesterday I also did something else I did on that day four years ago:  I stopped by the church in which I served as an altar boy and the parish school, diagonally across the street, I attended. Both looked much as they did then and, in fact, as they did in my childhood.  The church seems not to have aged at all:  Although not an unattractive building, it's not an architectural or historic landmark of any sort.  The school, on the other hand, is an even more ordinary structure, and it did look shabbier from the outside than it did four years ago, not to mention the way it looked when I attended it forty years ago.  


One difference, though, between now and the recent or distant past is that I had no compulsion--from others or from within me--to go inside either one.  When I last went to the neighborhood, four years ago, I entered the church for the first time since my days as an altar boy. There, I confronted the "ghost" of the priest who molested me.


So, really, I no longer have any reason to go into that church.  Actually, the neighborhood felt almost as if it were no longer part of my life.  In one sense, it isn't:  I've changed.  And, of course, the neighborhood has changed.  It is because of those changes, in fact, that I was surprised to see the that the school, and even the church,  were still there:  Nearly everyone in that neighborhood is a Hasidic Jew.  In fact, all of the announcements I saw taped to lampposts and the signs on the stores are printed in Hebrew characters.


But even if the neighborhood were still filled with blue-collar Italian- and Irish-Americans and non-Hasidic Jews, as it was during my childhood, it would have felt like a neighborhood that was no longer, and perhaps had never been, mine.  Or, at least, the things I remembered would have been merely the past rather than my specific memories.  And, you might say that I've "moved on" from having confronted the "ghost" of that priest.  He is long dead, and the boy he fondled and whose lips he pressed against him has become the woman whose image on the distant horizon of his life tormented him precisely because she--that is to say, I--was the one who sustained him.  That I did that, and have become whom I've become, may be the only things that no one can take away from me.  And I'm certainly not about to let anyone--much less a ghost--steal them from me.  


That, by the way, is also the reason I have decided not to pursue it legally.  For one thing, those multi-million dollar settlements the media trumpets are only single notes in the cacophony the legal system.  For another, I simply don't want to relive or even recount what happened for lawyers and judges--or, for that matter, any other civil or ecclesiastical authority.  And, finally, I don't know how many years I have left.  I'd prefer not to spend them dealing with the legal system.


I don't know when, or whether, I'll go back.  For now, I hope I won't need to.